Day Six: Spa/Snow Day!

I woke up the next morning with one thought and one thought only: SPA DAY!

Verity and I had decided on a cheaper, more traditional Turkish-style bath, and Király fit the bill. So we ate breakfast — after I discovered that someone had stolen one of my yogurts — and we took the metro up to Battyány tér/Batty Aunty, where we were greeted with a magnificent view of the Budapest parliament building from across the river.

Parliament. And ice flows.

My tourist GPS was functioning that day, and it made me look up at the right moment to find the baths.  If only the receptionist’s pleasantness had been functioning, too.  Verity and I took our time reading signs so that we understood exactly what we wanted and how much to pay for it — a day pass with massage and 4700 HUF, respectively — but when we got up to the register, the lady was on the phone.  That was okay: it could’ve been work-related, and we could wait.  But she kept talking, and we kept standing there until finally she asked what we wanted, and we said, “Two—”

“Two.”  And then she turned back to her phone conversation and computer, presumably to charge us for two of something we didn’t want.  We tried politely correcting her through the Plexiglas, but she was still chattering away and didn’t hear us.  When she paused her conversation to throw two wristbands at us, we corrected in unison, “Two combination tickets!”

She glared at us for a moment before snatching back the wristbands and slamming them onto the table next to the computer.  Of course I felt guilty, but really, when she had said no more than a handful of words to us, she could hardly be angry with us.  In the middle of what I can only assume was correcting our transaction, another phone rang, and she put down the one she was holding to pick up a corded one.

She’d been talking on her cell phone the whole time!

Verity and I shared a look of pure incredulity until the lady asked for our money, slid both the receipts and wristbands under the glass, and pointed behind us off to the right: “Upstairs.”

Well that got off to a great start.

It didn’t matter, though: our massages would take care of all that crap.  We walked up the stairs to be met by a tall but portly Hungarian man who directed us to our changing rooms, pistachio green in color.  I finished first, and in my swimming suit, I was ushered into a massage room and instructed to strip.  Completely.  Ugh.  Okay.  Fine.  This better be worth it.

Oh, it was.  The lady worked out knots I didn’t even know I’d had, and by the time I was done, I felt boneless and so completely relaxed.  My masseuse didn’t speak English, but Verity’s did, and he offered all sorts of advice on Budapest and asked questions about London.

I waited in a “resting room” (pastel blue tile) for Verity and contemplated how this room looked like it should have been out any of the Ghost Adventures episodes that cover 1950’s-era American sanatoriums.  I tried to ignore the creepy vibe it gave off.

Finally Verity was finished, and we headed downstairs to the baths without any instructions as to how to proceed, so we made it up as we went along: showering and then dunking in the 30°C/86°F water to start with before wading through a flooded arched entryway into the main bath area.

Through a haze of steam and low, yellow light, I could see a domed arch with circles cut out to let in a small amount of natural light over the main pool.  Two other small pools lay off to the side, one to the right and one on the opposite side of the main pool, and the steam emanated from around a door next to that pool. The entire area was constructed out of smooth dark brown stone (I’m no expert geologist, so I won’t guess) and seemed a place out of time.  Y’know, besides the flip-flops and Speedos.

Picture shamelessly taken from the Spas Budapest website. It was not this light when we were there.

The Király baths were built during the Turkish occupation in 1565 by . . . the Turks, and unlike most of the other baths, they actually aren’t fed by the many hot springs (filled with more minerals than you can shake a stick at) that run under Budapest.  The hot water comes from the Lukács baths because the Turks wanted access to baths even in the case of a siege and so included them inside the walls on Castle Hill.  They clearly had their priorities straight, those Turks; two thumbs way up.

I guessed the general principle was to go from pool to pool in order to increase or decrease blood circulation as needed.  Each pool had a different temperature: the main one was 35°-36°C/95°-97°F, the right one 39°-40°C/102°-104°F, and the one next to the steam room was 26°C/79°F.  Even the two saunas next to the showers had different temps: 50°-60°/122°-140°F and then 60°-70°/140°-158°F respectively.

We spent about two, two and a half hours bouncing back and forth between pools and into the saunas whenever we got too prune-y.  I thoroughly enjoy people watching, and being at a public bath frequented by locals brings out the big guns.  I watched as an Old Boys in Too-Small Speedos club met around one of the rails into the pool; a younger couple swam around each other with barely any water in between naughty bits; and a couple of friends helped each other float in the middle of the main pool. I’m pretty sure I fell asleep more than once, so relaxed was I, but eventually relaxation turns to boredom, and after all the locals left around noon, only us, a father/son pair, and that awkward couple remained, so we hoisted ourselves out of the pool, dried, dressed, and left for the hostel, as we’d both forgotten to bring shower necessities.

We stepped outside to a world of white.

SNOW.

Yesterday had been warmer than what we’d expected, and I guess it was warm enough to snow, and snow it did.  While we were relaxing for a mere three hours, it about two inches and was continuing to pour snowy white wetness down on our heads.  By the time we made it back to the hostel, we couldn’t see five feet in front of us and took refuge in the nearest metro station/underground passageway in order to brush off the snow and figure out what we wanted to do for lunch.  (In Budapest, they have underground passages for busy intersections instead of cluttering the streets with traffic lights and crosswalks.  Small but ingenious idea!)  We just wanted food, something simple and quick, and decided to find a Burger King.  When wandering appeared somewhat fruitless (although the snow had let up a bit), we found a restaurant-laden area near the center-center of town, and there we decided on Relay Café.  We both had goulash-soup — with more appealing dumplings this time! — and I persuaded Verity to share my “authentic Hungarian dessert” with me: something they translated as golden tagliatelle in a vanilla sauce.  What came out was the most delicious coffee cake I’ve ever tasted.

Therefore, we swore we wouldn’t eat again until we got to Prague.

Surprisingly, we kept that pledge until dinnertime.

After lunch, we pit-stopped at the hostel for a quick shower to wash off the thermal baths’ minerals and to, what, get some laundry done!  As we both had limited space in our backpacks and maximum cold weather outside, we’d already gone through all of our clothes an uncomfortable number of times, and so we sprung for a shared cycle costing 1000 HUF each.  Fabulous idea: my clothes haven’t fit so well since I left the States!  They were actually dried by a dryer!

While the hostel staff looked after our stinky clothes, Verity and I split up to conquer the city in different ways: she wanted to wander down the Danube (which I did before she arrived), and so I decided to wander along the Buda side of the city.  Only I got distracted by the Citadel Hill, or Gellért Hill.  Right at the foot of the bridge closest to out hostel, with staircases and footpaths visibly crisscrossing through the forest, Gellért Hill was a challenge I couldn’t ignore, especially after one, the snow that morning, and two, that massive dessert digesting in my belly.  So, despite the less than optimal conditions and lack of solid treads on my boots, I decided to conquer that hill.  The hill used to be a giant vineyard before the Hapsburgs built the Citadel, a military outpost, in 1849 following a Hungarian revolution, and of course, future rulers used it as to rain pain/bombs down on Budapest when the population got feisty.  Now, both the hill and Citadel are protected parklands and a museum, respectively.

God, it was gorgeous.  The higher I climbed, the farther away the city sounded but the closer I felt to it; the entirety of Budapest seemed right at my fingertips, if I just let go of the guard rail that kept me from plunging to my death, and I’m not being dramatic.  Snow lay on every surface, and only previous path-forgers’ footprints distinguished the path from former greenery.  I stumbled upon a random monument, and it had a makeshift sled poised at the ledge above it: someone had broken off a section of wooden fence and slid down part of the hill!  Despite the insanity involved (or perhaps because of it), I felt sorely tempted to do the same, but I soldiered on.

Citadel Hill from the bridge.

My thoughts: Ooh, monument! [starts listing across the road]

View of the bridge from the hill!

The sled was right next to me.

At every new level, I would think to turn back and find Verity, but the prospect of reaching the top, of spreading my arms wide and encompassing Budapest in a cozy embrace was too strong, and so I plodded along, praying I wouldn’t end up Chutes and Ladders-ing my way back down.

The last stretch, which I aptly named the Stairs of Death, was the trickiest, but I pulled myself up with a strong grip and sheer will power to gaze out over the most spectacular view of both the Buda and Pest sides of the river.  Regardless of advancements in technology, panoramic pictures or videos cannot accurately capture the full breadth and the clarity one sees.  Even though the clouds slung low in the sky, I could see mountains in the distance, and the city spread before me like a Christmas tree skirt wrapped snuggly at the base of the hill.

(There was supposed to be a panoramic video here, but neither Blogspot nor YouTube will upload it, so . . . Yeah.)

So did the dark clouds sweeping down those mountains from the west.

Oh expletive.

I didn’t care about traction in my haste to make my way back down; in fact, I may have caught more air than steps on the way as a snowy hail began to pelt my face. Literally skating along the paths, I threw up my cowl/hood before spotting a shortcut someone had made down not-as-steep-as-it-could-be portion of forest.  Even though I knew I was possibly taking the state of my ankles into my own hands, I slipped and slid my way down, only nearly losing my footing towards the bottom of the shortcut, using a bench to break my fall.  I loosened my grip on the back of the bench and looked up to see Verity trying (not very hard) not to laugh at me.

She’d gotten bored with her Danube tour and decided to tackle Gellért Hill as well; had I come from the top?

“Yes.  And I’m not using the Stairs of Death again.”

So we took a longer, more circuitous route this time, which actually deposited us near the Liberation Monument overlooking the Danube to the east and the residential part of Buda to the south and west.  The Citadel itself seemed rather not open, and so we carefully made our way back down the hill — I only ended up wrong-side up two times, thankyouverymuch.

Liberation Monument.

The bridge. Again.

Only some of the paths were lit, so when the lights turned on, we knew we had to hurry it up.

Story: I was "skiing," and when I took this corner, I slipped and only when I grabbed onto this light pole did I stop. That near-death experience turned into a photo op. Story. Of my. Life.

While there might not have been a ton of light on the paths, what light there was looked awesome.

We ate the exact same dinner as the night before, being the paragons of variety that we are, but we had to battle the group of mixed Americans and UKers to get at kitchen utensils.  They mostly kept to themselves except to ask if we wanted a cup of the coffee that they Irish guy had made; it was his first time making coffee in a machine, and he was proud.

Oh, and someone had thoroughly cleaned out the fridge, so much so in fact that they threw my clearly labeled apples into the free-for-all bin, and one was missing.  Grr.

But I set aside my growing bitterness towards this hostel’s food fairies in order to attend a hostel social event: a local wine tasting.  Though it ended up being Verity and I, the snuggly couple from beneath our loft, and the Americans/UKers, the receptionist poured out glasses of Hungarian white wine mixed with soda water: a spritzer, which he readily admitted was better suited for summer months.  I tried to foster conversation by eavesdropping and offering my opinion on Budapest’s baths, but they quickly dropped the subject, and so I turned back to the French Budapest guide I’d found on a shelf, and Verity and I solidified our plans for tomorrow.  When the receptionist heard my rough translation the book into English, he asked if he could help — a complete reversal of the Communist Statue Park incident.  We asked which site would be more worthwhile: the Citadel or the castle.

“Buda Castle,” he answered without either hesitation or further comment.  Okay then.  We would spend the whole day up the hill at Buda Castle.